Share this

Read more!

Get our weekly email

Enter your email address

A crowd gathers to ponder "Guernica". Flickr/rogiro. Some rights reserved.

George
Orwell once told Arthur Koestler that "history stopped in 1936."

Both men realised that the Spanish Civil War,
triggered by a military coup in July of that year, presaged what was inevitable
for the rest of Europe: the destruction of entire cities, the bold and violent
expansion of Fascism, and a total war in which it was impossible to be neutral.

Their personal experiences of the Spanish War – captured in Koestler’s Spanish Testament and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia– have become leading works
in a massive canon of literature on the brutal nearly 3-year-long conflict. If
these testimonies have formed much of the modern understanding of twentieth century
warfare, then they are matched, if not exceeded, by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, the sprawling and terrifying
3.5x7.8m mural displayed in Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum.

On the afternoon of April 26, 1937, Guernica, “the cultural capital of the
Basque people”, was turned into a pile of burning rubble by “twenty-five or more of Germany's best-equipped bombers,
accompanied by at least twenty more Messerschmitt and Fiat Fighters”, which
“dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on
the village.”

A third of the town’s population was killed or wounded –
demonstrating not only the barbarity of the Nazi Condor Legion, but also Adolf
Hitler’s willingness to unequivocally back his ally, General Franco. While
Britain, France and the Soviet Union – supposedly friends of the Spanish
Republic – either stood by or intervened “on a niggardly scale”,
the Fascist powers acted decisively and ruthlessly. In 1942, Orwell would write, “the
Spanish Civil War demonstrated that the Nazis knew what they were doing and
their opponents did not.”

"Iraq, if you look back at
it, is going to be like the Spanish Civil War"

80
years on from the bombing of Guernica, Picasso’s painting and the wider Spanish
War remain powerful symbols and analogies for politicians, writers and
self-styled “liberal interventionists.” UK Labour MP (and former Shadow Foreign
Secretary) Hillary Benn provided a clear example of this thinking in his widely
applauded speech to the British Parliament on December 2, 2015. “As a
party we have always been defined by our internationalism,” he said to his
Labour Party colleagues. Describing “Daesh”, as “fascists”, he told the House:

“What we know about fascists
is that they need to be defeated. It is why, as we have heard tonight,
socialists, trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the
1930s to fight against Franco. It is why this entire House stood up against
Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the
denial of human rights and for justice. My view is that we must now confront
this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria.”

Benn
is far from the first western politician to evoke the memory of this period in
support of a foreign military intervention. The Hitler (or Munich) analogy is
particularly well-worn from use in defence of the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq
– even U.S. intervention in Grenada and Nicaragua (for a long discussion of
these examples, see Jeffrey Record’s Appeasement Reconsidered).

But Spain, too, has
become a popular reference point. U.S. Senator John McCain – one of the most
ardent hawks in Congress – has long glorified the “idealistic freedom
fighters”
of the International Brigades, while former Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman
in 2007 likened the Iraq War to the Spanish Civil War
because the “larger war on Islamist terrorism” playing out in the country was
comparable to the wider war against fascism which began in Spain.

For
Lieberman, however, “The painful irony of this moment in our history is that
while, in some senses, it is comparable to the 1930s, it's also already 1942,
because Pearl Harbour in this war has already happened on 9/11/01.” A year
earlier he suggested: “Iraq, if you look back at
it, is going to be like the Spanish Civil War, which was the harbinger of what
was to come.”

As for the idea that Saddam Hussein and his regime posed a
threat like the fascists of the 30s, Chris Rock put it better than anyone else: "If they’re so
dangerous, how come it only took two weeks to take over the whole fucking
country? Shit, man, you couldn't take over Baltimore in two weeks.”

In
Syria, however, the analogy of the 1930s – and Spain in particular – seems
somewhat more appropriate. For one thing, thousands of mostly young people have
poured into the country from across the world, with motivations seemingly as
various as securing the Caliphate, resisting a murderous dictator, and even “Fighting ISIS and
Patriarchy with the Kurds.”

And they are doing to Aleppo precisely what the Nazis did
to Guernica in the Spanish Civil War.” Portuguese cartoonist Vasco Gargalo
created his own version of Picasso’s Guernica, featuring the faces of Bashar
al-Assad and Vladimir Putin among the distorted shapes and warped images of the
original painting. “Aleppo(nica)”, he called it.

The new military humanism

By
no means are allof these historical
references aimed at precipitating a “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, but
an “atrocity campaign” – supported by relentless,
almost pornographic images of bloodshed – is not usually meant to make you sad,
or make you want to donate to the UNHCR; it is meant to make you angry. Most
importantly, it makes you want to punish the perpetrator, and pressure your
government to do it on your behalf. This is as true today as it was in
1937.

Historical
analogy has always given force to arguments for “humanitarian intervention”,
but also dangerously clouded our judgement. As Noam Chomsky documents in The New Military Humanism(1999), it is a great irony
that interventionists frequently draw on the horror of the 30s and 40s not to
defend the UN Charter and some semblance of the post-1945 international order,
but to undermine it.

Anyone
who has seen Guernica or the images
of the Spanish War should be wary of such a cavalier attitude. They should
remember (to quote Orwell again), that even if they are fighting a tyrant, “a louse is a louse and a
bomb is a bomb”; and “the laws of nature are not suspended for a ‘red’ army any more
than for a ‘white’ one.”

Finally,
they shouldn’t uncritically swallow shallow historical analogies. In Syria, how
do they really help us? If ISIS are the fascists, then is Assad Stalin? Should
we then work with him, as Boris Johnson once suggested, because WWII taught us
that “we cannot be picky about our
allies”? Or
is he Hitler? Or is ISIS Germany and Assad
Japan? That
might work. Wait, was “Jihadi John” part of the International
Brigades? Is Jabhat al-Nusra the
Popular Front?

It’s
worth considering such elementary questions before calling every war “Spain”,
every despot “Hitler” and every pro-western rebel group the “International
Brigades.” Otherwise, we will debase the very real struggles fought in a time
far less comfortable than our own.

Comments

Related

This article is published under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any
queries about republishing please
contact us.
Please check individual images for licensing details.